The Met Makes Its Biggest Purchase Ever

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: November 10, 2004

In its most expensive purchase ever, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has agreed to pay more than $45 million for a painting by the early Renaissance master Duccio di Buoninsegna no bigger than a sheet of typing paper.

The work, ''Madonna and Child,'' merely 8 by 11 inches and painted in tempera and gold on a wood panel around 1300, is the first Duccio to enter the Met's collection, filling a gap in its Renaissance holdings that the museum had assumed it could not close, said Philippe de Montebello, director of the Met. The sale of the painting, the last work by Duccio known to be owned by a private collector, was negotiated through Christie's in London.

In reporting the acquisition, the Met would not discuss price beyond confirming that it was the most costly purchase in its history. (In such deals, buyers are often legally bound not to reveal the sale price.) But art experts familiar with the deal, insisting on anonymity for fear of jeopardizing the sale, said the price was $45 million to $50 million. That would top the Met's previous record purchase, of Jasper Johns's ''White Flag'' (1955) for more than $20 million in 1998.

Works by Duccio, the pre-eminient painter of early Renaissance Siena, are extremely rare. Only a dozen or so are known to survive, including his famous ''Maest? altarpiece (1308-11) in the Museum dell'Opera del Duomo in Siena. Paintings by the artist owned by museums outside Italy are usually fragments of the ''Maest?' which included nearly 60 individual narrative scenes.

The only Duccio in a New York museum, ''The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain'' at the Frick Collection, is a ''Maest? fragment.

The Met's ''Madonna,'' however, is one of the few that Duccio created as individual works of art and was never part of a larger assemblage. ''It's the artist's complete thought on the subject,'' said Keith Christiansen, a curator of European painting at the Met. Rarer still, it remains in its original frame, singed along the bottom edge by devotional candles.

As one of the most important painters of the early 14th century, Duccio, along with his Florentine contemporary Giotto, blazed a path from the Byzantine style to early Italian Renaissance painting. Duccio was known for dynamic new altarpiece designs, a striking use of landscape and color, and unusually expressive relationships between the figures in his compositions.

''The first slide in an art history 101 course is a Duccio,'' Mr. de Montebello said. ''He was one of the founders of Western art.''

Describing the painting as transfixing, he said the acquisition was ''one of the highest points'' of his 27-year tenure and an ''unhoped-for opportunity.''

''It will enable visitors for the first time to follow the entire trajectory of European painting from its beginnings to the present,'' Mr. de Montebello said.

To buy the painting the museum has committed a substantial part of its acquisitions fund toward it, supplemented by contributions from private sources. Mr. de Montebello said that the money tapped for the purchase would not draw on public or private money specifically set aside for either museum operations or capital construction and maintenance.

He said he was not sure when the painting, which is still in London awaiting an export license, would go on view, but he hoped it would be on the museum's walls in a few weeks.

The Met has decided to call it the Stroganoff Madonna, after its first recorded owner, Count Grigorii Stroganoff, a serious collector of early Italian paintings who died in Rome in 1910. But the painting is better known as the Stoclet Madonna, for its next owner, Adolphe Stoclet, a Belgian industrialist and builder of a well-known palace in Brussels designed by Josef Hoffmann.

After Stoclet's death in 1949, the painting became relatively inaccessible, Mr. Christiansen said. Over the last 15 to 20 years the Stoclet collection has gradually been divided up among heirs. For years scholars and curators knew of the existence of ''Madonna and Child'' and hoped that one day it would be offered for sale. There was speculation that the Belgian government might try to buy it. Rumors started last spring that the painting was coming on the market, Mr. Christiansen said. But the Met learned nothing further until July, when he was contacted by Nicholas Hall, an expert in the old master painting department at Christie's. Mr. Hall told him that the auction house had been asked to represent the seller, heirs of Stoclet, and was wondering if the Met might be interested.

''He gave me the transparency, which sat on my desk until Philippe returned from vacation,'' Mr. Christiansen said, referring to Mr. Montebello. ''He knew the painting was coming on the market, but I don't think he'd seen a picture of it. When I showed it to him, it took him about 30 seconds to say, 'We really have to have this.'''

Fearing competition from museums like the Louvre in Paris, which also has no Duccio, Mr. Christiansen, Mr. de Montebello and Dorothy Mahon, a Met conservator, wasted no time. They flew to London in early September to see the painting in a special viewing room at Christie's headquarters there.

''We spent a long time looking at it,'' Mr. Christiansen said. ''It's not only an incredibly beautiful picture; it's also unbelievably moving.''

''And of course people will be astonished by how small it is,'' he added.

But Mr. Christiansen pointed out: ''If you think of the great Renaissance paintings in the Met, they're all small. Our Botticelli, ''The Last Communion of St. Jerome,'' our Mantegna, ''Adoration of the Shepherds,'' or our diptych by van Eyck -- all our greatest pictures are small pictures.''

The ''Madonna's'' almond-shaped eyes are downcast, her face pensive; the dusky child on her lap lifts a pudgy hand to brush away his mother's veil.

''It's a picture created for patient viewing,'' Mr. Christiansen said. ''And as you look at it, the image grows in your imagination. Here Duccio has explored intimacy in a new way.''

The figures are painted behind a parapet. ''This is the first illusionistic parapet in European art,'' he said. ''When you think of all those famous images by Bellini or the common Renaissance Madonna, theirs is an illusionistic parapet that serves as a go-between so that you pass from the world we inhabit into the fictional world of the artist.''

In his 1979 monograph on Duccio, the British scholar John White called the painting ''the first, lonely forerunner of that long line of Italian Madonnas with a parapet which achieved its finest flowering almost two centuries later in Giovanni Bellini's splendid variation on the theme.''

Photographs of the work from the 19th century reveal two burns on the bottom edge of the frame, no doubt from candles lighted over many years in which the ''Madonna'' was used as a devotional object, probably in someone's bedroom, Mr. Christiansen said.

It is in excellent condition, he added. ''It's quite exceptional and very fortunate that it hasn't been through the hands of a lot of dealers, each of whom would have tarted it up in one way or another,'' he said. ''It's in a very pure state.''

''It's a completely different picture from the Frick's,'' Mr. Christiansen said. ''The Frick's shows Duccio creating one of the early landscapes of Western art. Ours is Duccio as a painter of devotional subjects.''

''Great pictures -- even if they aren't a van Gogh 'Sunflowers' or a Monet 'Water Lilies' that the public understands -- nonetheless are ones that register with time,'' he said. ''Once people see this they will recognize that this is a keystone of Western art.''

Photos: ''Madonna and Child'' painted by the early Renaissance master Duccio di Buoninsegna in about 1300, at nearly its actual size.. (Photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art)(pg. E1); A detail of Duccio's ''Madonna and Child,'' tempera and gold on wood. (Photo by Metropolitan Museum of Art)(pg. E7)